"Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection."
— Rabindranath Tagore

Monday, July 07, 2014

QUOTES ON POVERTY

Photo from a School of the America's protest in Georgia.

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” ~ Aristotle

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I
ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ~ Helder Camara

“Poverty is the worst form of violence.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It
is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of
priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the
modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century
consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a
reminder of nothing.” ~ John Berger

“We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and
executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In
the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference,
all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism
we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting
everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of
it and step on much of it with our feet.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being
unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with
medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love.
There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are
many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind
of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality.
There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.” ~ Mother Teresa

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” ~ Dwight
D. Eisenhower